


Mors Vincit Omnia (Death Conquers All)

by TurtleTotem



Category: The Dresden Files - All Media Types, X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dresden Files Fusion, Ghosts, M/M, Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-12
Updated: 2018-04-12
Packaged: 2019-04-21 22:47:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 8,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14295132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TurtleTotem/pseuds/TurtleTotem
Summary: Erik is a ghost, bound to his own skull by magic. Charles inherited Erik when his dark-wizard uncle died, and if his feelings toward Erik go far beyond that of an old friend and teacher, what does it matter? It can't ever come to anything. Erik is dead.Then again, so is Uncle Sebastian... supposedly...(in short, a Cherik version of the Dresden Files episode "What About Bob.")





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Ittakun's amazing [crossover moodboard](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/172207297051/turtletotem-ittakun-idea-by-turtletotem), please check it out!

He was a tiny slip of a thing, Shaw's new apprentice, Erik thought as the boy entered the room. Slender and pale, wide blue eyes dominating his face. Shaw had said he was what, ten years old? It was hard for Erik to keep track of people's ages sometimes. After the first few centuries, it all started blurring together.

"And this is my assistant, Erik," Shaw said, gesturing grandly with one hand; the other was clamped on the boy's shoulder. "He'll be helping me teach you about the power you have."

By which he meant Erik would be doing the bulk of the teaching, all the grunt work and slog of getting a child to memorize runes and laws and regulations. That was how it had worked with the last apprentice, anyway. Shaw never did anything hard if he could get his slave to do it; what else were slaves for?

Erik didn't want to think about the last apprentice. He'd let himself get attached to someone Shaw might one day see as a threat; that was a mistake.

"It's nice to meet you, Mr. Erik," the boy said, stepping forward and extending a hand to shake. Meek and polite and solemn; what a strange child. But then, he was surely still grieving his father, which could make any child subdued.

The boy's father, too, had been a threat to Shaw.

"A pleasure, Master Xavier," Erik said, bowing slightly with his hands behind his back. He made no move toward the outstretched hand. The boy frowned.

Shaw laughed, a smug bark. "I'm afraid Erik can't shake your hand, Charles," he said, "seeing as he died back in the 1100s."

Little Charles's eyes went even larger, staring at Erik with fascination more than fear. Interesting. "Are you a ghost?"

"I am indeed," Erik said. "And as a mere spirit, I can make myself seen, heard—but not felt. The matter that composed my body has long since rotted away." He passed his hand through the globe on the nearby desk, to demonstrate.

"Most of it, anyway." Shaw stepped to the side and picked up the human skull sitting on a shelf, its surface heavily carved with runes and symbols. He tossed it carelessly into the air and caught it again. Erik had long since learned not to wince or protest. "This is Erik's skull, Charles. Come touch it, if you like."

Charles approached, glancing uncertainly between Erik and the skull. He did not touch it, though his fingers hovered above the carved surface. Could he feel the threads of power there? "This was your _head?"_

"It certainly was," Shaw said, answering before Erik could. "Magic binds the ghost to the skull, and the skull to me—and so Erik is kept on this plane of existence, at my beck and call. It's terribly useful. Would you like to learn how to do that someday?"

Instead of answering the question, Charles wrinkled his forehead. "But you said he died hundreds of years ago. How did you use magic on his skull when you weren't born yet?"

The answer, of course, was that Shaw was older even than Erik—how much older, Erik had never been able to learn. But Shaw only smiled and said, "Sweet child, you still have very much to learn."


	2. Chapter 2

"Another day, another dollar," Charles called cheerily as he turned the sign in the window to OPEN, right under the gold lettering that spelled _Charles Xavier, Wizard_.

"Multiple dollars, one hopes," Erik replied, "the bills being what they are."

Charles, struggling to raise the blinds, grinned over his shoulder at Erik. As always, the ghost cut a dramatic figure, lurking near the bookcases in his dark robes and slicked-back hair, hands clasped behind his back as if to keep himself from trying to touch anything. "Who knows, I might get another kook looking for a love potion!"

His ad in the phone book stated very clearly that Charles didn't do love potions or children's parties, but people still asked. Perhaps it wouldn't be a violation of ethics to give the next one a bottle of Kool-Aid labeled _Eros Aqua_... But then how  would the unhappy customer react when the potion didn't work? No, there were enough people eager to call the only wizard in Chicago a fraud; best not make them correct.

Erik was scowling.

"A joke, my friend," Charles assured him, and crossed the room to pull a few books off the shelf. "We're not actually doing too badly, you know. There was the lost dog we found last week, and that minor haunting... Between that sort of thing and the consulting cases Detective MacTaggert brings us, we're keeping the lights on."

Erik only scowled harder.

"Oh, Erik, what do you have against Moira MacTaggert?" Charles said, shaking his head indulgently. "She's a perfectly pleasant woman—whip-smart, fearless, and has the uncommon good sense to bring in a wizard on cases that defy the laws of known reality. Even if she can't actually bring herself to admit she believes in magic."

"I've always had an uneasy relationship with the constabulary."

"That, I can believe." Charles needed a place to set the books; he shuffled them awkwardly into the crook of one arm and tried to clear a place on the table one-handed. Half-opened mail, more books, empty teacups, and a candlestick he shoved unceremoniously aside; Erik's skull he picked up more carefully and moved to a safer place atop the bookshelf.

The skull was Charles's charge now. Sebastian Shaw had called Charles "the most powerful wizard he'd seen since the War of Independence." It hadn't enabled him to free Erik from his bindings, only to transfer those bindings to himself. Maybe someday… but to free Erik would mean to lose him forever.

 _Not forever,_ Erik had told him once. _Wizards have long lives, but not eternal ones, as even Shaw discovered in time. Should I ever be freed, there would come a day when you could come find me, on the other side._

Should Charles fail to free him, he would die in due course, leaving Erik behind as so many had left him behind, helpless to resist the orders of whoever next picked up his skull…

"What are you up to with those?" Erik asked, peering over Charles's shoulder as he sat and spread out the books. He was close enough that Charles fancied he could have felt his body heat, the whisper of his breath—if he'd had any.

"Research," Charles said, trying not to get distracted.

"Research on posthumous communication," Erik said, frowning at the books. "With whom are we trying to communicate? Not your late uncle, I hope."

"Certainly not." Charles hesitated. "I dreamed about my father last night. Dreamed he was trying to talk to me."

Erik made a small "hmm" sound, considering and not unsympathetic. "Even for wizards, sometimes a dream is just a dream."

"And sometimes not."

"And sometimes not," Erik allowed.

Charles turned his head, so close to Erik's that his nose might have brushed Erik's cheek, if it had been there. "Do you think me childish?"

"For mourning a murdered parent? Hardly." Erik smiled at him, that teasing smirk Charles knew so well. "There are so many better reasons to reproach you than that. Your slovenly habits, your geriatric sense of style, your merry willingness to be hoodwinked by all comers—"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah." Charles laughed and waved off these old complaints. "Really, though, Erik. Sometimes I think you'll always see me as a skinny ten-year-old, complaining about runes and smuggling cookies up my sleeves. How could you help it? What could any mortal be, in your eyes, but a child?"

Erik tilted his head, regarding Charles thoughtfully. Their faces were still very close. Erik, though so often aloof, had a funny sense of personal space sometimes. It probably came of not having a body to judge distance with.

"I am no immortal creature, Charles, only a mortal man denied his death," Erik said. "Time does not fly by for me, but drags along, grinding like two edges of a broken bone. I am all too aware of its passing." He hesitated, which was not something Erik often did, and said, low-voiced, "I am fully aware that you are a grown man."

Charles stopped breathing.

Erik had been many things to him over the years. Teacher, friend, protector, guide—and as Charles blossomed into all the horrors of adolescence, the object of an agonizing crush that he had never actually gotten over, merely learned to muscle aside and carry on in spite of. It had to be the most  pointlessly painful thing his heart had ever done to him, because even on the vanishingly slim chance Erik ever returned his feelings, what could they do about it? In any case he was twenty-five years old now and that was all ancient history.

And yet there was Charles's traitorous heart, picking up speed and flooding his skin with tingling color, as he dared to glance up into Erik's face. Erik was looking back at him with the most aching loneliness and longing he'd ever seen, or was he reading too much into it, was he projecting his own—

The bell over the door jangled, and Charles nearly jumped out of his skin.

"Hey there, Xavier," called Detective Moira MacTaggert. "I need to talk to you about a case."


	3. Chapter 3

"Moira!" Charles swallowed, forced a smile, marked his page in _Peeking Through the Gateway: Beyond_ _Séance and Ouija_ and closed it as he stood up. "Come in, come in, have a seat." Were his hands shaking, or was all the trembling internal? Charles swept up a few papers that had come to a rest on the sofa and chair he reserved for clients.

Moira was not moving toward the seats, but looking at Erik, her face so politely neutral that Charles knew she was suspicious of him. "Who's this? I didn't mean to interrupt anything."

By mutual agreement, Erik kept out of sight when anyone non-magical was around, but he hadn't had a chance to fade through a wall this time. "Whatever would you be interrupting?" Erik said, his voice utterly colorless.

Charles couldn't muster the nerve to quite look at Erik, but he threw a smile and careless gesture in his direction. "Oh, this is my assistant, Erik."

"Since when do you have an assistant?"

"Oh, Erik's an old friend. He's in and out all the time. A case, then? Lay it on me." He took the chair and patted the sofa, where Moira reluctantly sat down, still watching Erik uneasily. Oh, was he glaring at her again? He usually did that behind her back.

"Erik, be a dear and get us some tea, would you?" No tea would be forthcoming, of course, but it did get Erik out of the room, sliding through the doorway dark and silent as a shadow. "All right, Moira, what have you got for me? Not-quite-human remains, an impossible disappearance, a body entirely drained of blood?"

Moira did something of a double take. "And if I did, would you tell me I was looking for vampires?"

"Certainly not. You never find the bodies when vampires are involved, they're much too smart for that these days. Certain kinds of demon, though…"

Moira shook her head impatiently. Charles knew she regarded ninety percent of what he said as nonsense, but that last ten percent had proven useful too often for her to ignore. Which meant she usually had a better attitude about it, instead of looking so grim and unhappy—

"Charles, I'm not here to offer you a case. I'm here because you've been _implicated_ in a case."

Charles blinked. "Say what now?" What had he done lately—only a spot of breaking and entering, didn't even leave any damage—

"Look, it's probably nothing," she said, "but we got an anonymous tip saying you were responsible for the death of your uncle, Sebastian Shaw."

All sound died away in Charles's head, leaving a profound stillness.

"We have to at least look into it, especially since you're a consultant for the department. I pulled up the file and your uncle never had an autopsy—"

"It was natural causes," Charles said through numb lips.

"Yes, apparently the medical examiner was satisfied that it was. But you were the only witness, so you can see why this tip raises questions."

 _Erik was there, too._ No, he couldn't bring Erik into it, couldn't risk any chain of events that might lead to Moira trying to handcuff a ghost. The Council of Wizards tolerated Charles's little business because so few actually believed in it; they wouldn't tolerate a law enforcement debacle bringing magic into the headlines.

"It must have been an awful experience for you, and I'm sorry we have to bring it back up. But the thing is, you inherited all of your uncle's considerable estate, and according to his friends you two didn't get along," Moira said carefully, watching him with some worry. "So you've got a certain amount of motive, and opportunity… Just tell me your side of things, huh?"

Charles felt his head sag forward into his hands. He struggled to breathe evenly. "Where should I start?"

"Well, why did Mr. Shaw leave everything to you?"

"He raised me as his own after I was orphaned. My mother died when I was a baby and my father…" He closed his eyes against the memory, his kind, gentle father, the anchor of Charles's young life, clutching his chest and grabbing instinctively at Charles's shoulder like Charles could save him. "He had a heart attack when I was ten. Out of nowhere. A healthy forty-year-old man with no history of heart trouble."

Moira hissed between her teeth. "That's awful, Charles."

"Uncle Sebastian was…" Charles hesitated, licked his lips. "I try not to lie to you, Moira, even though you seldom believe the truth. Sebastian Shaw was never my uncle. That was a ruse he used to get custody of children like me, children with power, with magic."

Moira's brow furrowed, a sort of neutral concern about the direction this was taking.

"He was not my uncle, and he was not a nice man. He taught me magic, and when my powers began to rival his own, he…" Charles regarded his clenched hands, wishing he hadn't sent Erik out of the room, wishing Erik could squeeze his hand and comfort him. "He tried to bind me. Enthrall me to his service, as he'd done to others. Eri—His assistant warned me, and so I was able to fight back."

That shouted warning had been all Erik could do to help him, and he would have paid dearly for it if Shaw had won. But in that split second of opportunity, Erik had chosen Charles.

And now, despite what he'd said about not lying to Moira, he had to choose his words carefully. The Council of Wizards had, warily and with great reservations, deemed Charles's actions self-defense; he was in no hurry to see if the U.S. court system would agree. Admitting to killing someone with black magic might still land him in a jail cell, even if they considered his confession some part madness or metaphor.

"The strain of the battle," Charles said, "was too much for Sebastian's body. He had a heart attack."

"A heart attack," Moira repeated. "Out of nowhere. A healthy man of," she glanced at her notes, "forty-nine years old, with no history of heart trouble."

Charles just looked at her steadily, and felt a certain amount of ice enter his voice, some dark thing left over from that day. "Funny world, isn't it."

Moira looked at him for a long moment. "You know, Charles, you could be a scary man if you wanted to be."

Charles forced his face into a version of his usual happy-go-lucky smile. "Only if you believe in magic, eh?"

"Yeah." She stood up, brushing down her skirt, gathering her notes. "So what I'm hearing is that you had a knock-down drag-out argument with your old uncle that triggered a heart attack."

"I imagine that'll satisfy your paperwork nicely."

She shook her head, moving toward the door. "Nothing about you ever does."


	4. Chapter 4

Business picked up after Moira left, and though it was nothing that turned out to be a paying gig—a woman looking for a palm reader, some kind of pastor looking for a fight about witchcraft—it was enough to forestall Erik's questions about what the detective had wanted. Until lunchtime, at least.

A storm had moved in during the morning, and was now spending its fury against the shop front, driving Charles to light the oil lamps and candles that he usually reserved for after dark. (Magic and technology didn't get along well, and Charles had long since found that in his presence, fire was more reliable than the electric lightbulb.) He pulled leftover pizza out of the icebox and ate it cold, plate propped atop the posthumous communication books from that morning.

Erik sat down across the table from him, or at least chose to let his intangible form look like it was sitting. "All right, Charles. Spill."

"Spill what?"

Erik just looked at him, the same dagger-eyed gaze that had never let him get away with lost homework or feigned helplessness as a child.

Charles sighed and began to relate what Moira had told him. By the time he was finished, Erik had gotten up and started pacing, back and forth across the wide space of the office like a caged panther.

"They can't prove anything," Erik said at last.

"Not without admitting black magic as evidence, which would be a whole new world of problems." Charles forced another bite of pizza down his throat. "So, you see, there's nothing to worry about."

"There certainly is something to worry about. This tipster, for one. Who—now, seven years later—would try to make trouble for you over Shaw's death? Who would even know?"

"Well, everyone on the Council, for starters," Charles said thoughtfully. "Though they're not usually the phone-the-police type, to say the least. You reckon it's Warden Stryker?" Most of the Wardens—those who tracked down and dispatched practicioners of black magic—had accepted the self-defense verdict. Stryker had not, and liked to make Charles's life as difficult as possible, looking for any excuse to take him in—or take him out.

Erik shook his head. "If there's one thing that horrifies Stryker more than a warlock escaping justice, it's revealing magic to mundanes. Another reason he hates you, of course."

"Of course," Charles agreed, glancing at the word WIZARD in his window. "Wouldn't put hypocrisy beyond him, but—yeah, probably not him."

Erik turned on his heel and paced back the other direction, walking through the edge of the sofa without seeming to notice. Erik frequently expressed worry, pain and most other negative emotions as seething anger. He was taking this worse than Charles had expected; now that he himself had had time to think it over, he couldn't imagine there being much to the case, however badly the subject had shaken him. It was the word of a valued (if disreputable) police consultant against an anonymous tip.

"I hope they don't pull out one of those, what are they called," Erik said irritably, "polymorph, no, the machine that's supposed to know if you're lying—"

"Polygraph," Charles said, suppressing a smile. Erik versus modern technology never stopped being amusing. The man was still a little suspicious of thermometers, though he found clockwork fascinating. "Those aren't admissible in court, partly because it can't really measure whether you're lying, only whether you feel guilty."

"Which you do. Even though you shouldn't."

Charles looked down at his pizza.

Erik crossed the room and stood at his shoulder, one hand moving in a brief, aborted gesture, as if he'd almost tried to touch him. "You did nothing wrong. You know that."

"I killed a man with black magic."

"You had no choice."

"There are always choices."

"You had only a moment to react—"

"And I instinctively reached for the darkest, most horrible things he'd taught me."

"Charles—"

"Magic always balances, eventually. You taught me that," Charles said. "What you do to others leaves a mark on yourself, and what you send out into the world eventually comes back to you. Someday what I did will come back to me."

Erik crouched down beside Charles's chair, meeting his eyes from below when Charles wouldn't look up. "It's true. Magic always balances. Sometimes you get what's coming around. And sometimes you _are_ what's coming around."

"What do you mean?"

"That _you_ were Shaw's justice. You were the conduit by which all the evil he'd done—to you, to your father, to Raven, to a thousand others—came back against him."

 _And to you. For that alone, he deserved to die_. That thought probably wasn't exactly proof of Charles's innate goodness, but—"Thank you," he said to Erik, wishing to God he could put out his hand and touch Erik's cheek, smooth back his hair, _something_ more substantial than words to show him how he felt. "I'll try to believe that."

 

Moira came back the next day, shadowed by her partner, Detective Levine.

"Your uncle must have had all kinds of friends in all kinds of places," she said, looking exasperated and unhappy. Levine, who had never liked Charles, looked grimly triumphant. Charles's stomach sank.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that, based on this anonymous tip, Sebastian Shaw's body was exhumed and autopsied yesterday. And what they found was not a heart attack."

"Looks more like the heart was crushed somehow inside the chest," Levine said. "They haven't figured out the details yet, but definitely not natural causes."

"Meaning what?" Charles said, acutely conscious of Erik watching from the doorway to their living quarters.

Moira sighed and pulled out her handcuffs with an air of apology. "Meaning you're under arrest for the murder of Sebastian Shaw."


	5. Chapter 5

Erik paced the empty office, snarling under his breath, ducking out of sight now and then when customers tried to enter the shop. Charles had remembered to lock the doors, but not to turn the sign to CLOSED. If Erik were the sort of friend and companion Charles deserved—i.e., the living sort—he could do that himself. Better than that, he could go with Charles to the police station, summon legal help for him, _something_ useful. Instead he was trapped here, unable to leave the building where his skull was housed, unable to touch or talk to anyone, unable to _do anything_ because he was _dead_ and ought to have left the mortal plane almost a thousand years ago.

Another man approached the shop, and at first Erik paid him no mind, only avoided his line of sight so he wouldn't start banging on the doors.

And then the doors opened.

That should never have happened, because Charles had not only locked them, but raised the magical wards he kept in place around the building as casually as most people carried their keys.

Erik backed up instinctively against the bookcase, throwing his senses open wide—the senses that remained to a ghost, that allowed him to feel the flow of spiritual and magical power better than he ever had in life.

The wards were gone, torn aside like cobwebs with a sweep of power that felt familiar enough to stop Erik's heart, if he'd had one. He recognized the power before the face, but the face was the same, too, middle-aged and coldly attractive, wearing his usual smug smile.

"Ah, Erik," said Sebastian Shaw. "How lovely to see you again."

 

"You're dead," Erik said.

"Of course I am. So are you, yet here we are."

"You're no ghost." He'd opened the doors by hand, and closed them behind him the same way.

"No." Shaw laughed, the same self-satisfied little chuckle that had always made Erik want to choke him. "An intangible shade such as yourself would not have served my master's purposes at all."

"Your master?"

"Sebastian Shaw, of course. Haven't you figured it out yet?" He looked Erik up and down. "I overestimated you."

But Erik's mind was already clicking the pieces into place. "You're a construct," he said. "A clone, a magical duplicate of the real Shaw."

"Oh, very good," Shaw said, applauding. "Yes, exactly. Set aside and updated now and again, until seven years of inactivity triggered me into waking. I exist for one purpose only, and that is to bring Sebastian Shaw back to life." He stepped into Erik's space, leaving him nowhere to go unless he wished to fade through the wall—and reached past him, to pluck the skull off the bookcase. "And you, my dear Erik, are going to help me."

Erik stayed stock still, rigidly controlling his panic. "You're not really a person, not really alive. You can neither claim nor command me."

Clone-Shaw gave a heavy sigh. "You're right, of course, though I thought there was a chance you might not realize it. Very well, then, I cannot command you. I can, however, offer you a bargain."

Erik spoke through clenched teeth. "I decline it."

"Oh? You decline freedom? You decline the restoration of your physical form? You decline mortality?"

Erik stared.

"Oh, yes, I could have restored you at any time these nine hundred years. It's not even very difficult. I don't have access to anything like the full range of my master's power, but enough for this little trick." Clone-Shaw bounced the skull in his hand a few times, regarding it thoughtfully as he pulled a wand out of his jacket. A muttering of spells Erik couldn't understand, and the skull began to glow, light welling up from the runes carved over its surface. The clone gave a final shout—and slammed the skull right into Erik's face.

Erik felt it hit him. _Felt it hit him._ Then felt the bookcase bump against him as he staggered backward, felt his chest expand with an instinctive gasp. Felt the stone floor beneath his feet and the rush of blood through his veins, his pulse throbbing like a drumbeat throughout his body.

"There you have it," Clone-Shaw said, spreading his hands and stepping back, out of arms' reach. "Mortality, Erik. All yours, and your natural lifespan restored, as long as you help me."

Erik stared down at his hands, felt of his arms, his hair, his pounding heart. "And if I refuse?" he said, voice hoarse and rusted in a dry mouth that had half-forgotten speech.

Clone-Shaw's eyes were as flat and reptile-cold as his creator's. "Then what I have given, I can as easily take away, and get what help I need elsewhere."

Erik leaned back against the bookcase, gulping air. He could smell candle-smoke and books and old herbs. He'd forgotten what smells were like. He closed his eyes, choking down a sob. _How can I give this up? How could anyone?_

"Well, Erik?"

Erik swallowed, another forgotten sensation. His eyes were stinging. "What do you need?"


	6. Chapter 6

"I didn't even keep his bloody money, no more than he'd already promised me for school. If that's your alleged motive, then you're barking up the wrong tree." Charles scowled down at his cuffed hands on the battered surface of the interrogation room table.

"Maybe it was just pure dislike, then," Detective Levine said. He leaned forward, his voice low and frank. Aiming for Good Cop. "I'll be honest, I wouldn't blame you. Everything we hear about your uncle says he was bad news. Even some of his close friends were concerned about the way he treated you. And the death of the other kid, Raven, that gets hinkier the more we look at it. Anything you want to tell us about that?"

Charles flinched, the mention of Raven taking him by surprise. His adopted sister, brought home by her spurious 'Uncle Sebastian' a few years after Charles—headstrong and rebellious from the first day, no matter how Charles begged her to keep her head down and do as she was told.

"Raven has nothing to do with this," Charles said.

"Kinda weird, though, isn't it, that all your family members die? Mother, father, sister, uncle—"

"Yes, thank you for reminding me of the relentless series of tragedies that has left me alone in the world, I'd almost forgotten."

A knock sounded on the door to the interrogation room, and Moira stepped in without waiting for an answer. Her expression was deeply suspicious—not of him, Charles thought, but of the man stepping in behind her.

Charles felt his mouth drop open.

"Levine, this is Agent Lehnsherr of the FBI," Moira said. "He's here to poach our suspect. Looks like you're in bigger trouble than we thought, Xavier."

Erik, _Erik_ was stepping in behind her, flashing a badge carelessly at Levine, catching the door on his shoulder and looking Charles up and down. _Erik._

"Seriously?" Levine sounded thrilled. "What do you want him for, fraud? I bet it's fraud."

"You're coming with me, Mr. Xavier," Erik said impatiently. "Detective, the cuffs?"

Levine released Charles's handcuffs from the bolt holding them to the table. Charles's mouth was still open—and Moira, who had seen Erik just yesterday morning in Charles's office, was definitely taking note of his reaction. Charles forced his jaw to close, but couldn't make himself look away from Erik. He had always appeared in the tunic and robe he'd been wearing when he died; now he was wearing a business suit, and to Charles's eyes it looked as bizarre as a hula costume.

Charles managed, with some help from his complete bewilderment, to say nothing as Erik walked him across the police station and into the elevator that would take them to the lobby. As soon as the doors closed between them and Moira's narrow eyes, he turned to Erik.

 _"Erik, what the hell?"_ The words broke off into somewhat hysterical laughter. "How are you here? How are you _solid?_ You just pushed a button on an elevator!" Now that he was working through some of the astonishment, joy was taking its place. "How did you do this? Will it last? Oh, Erik, please tell me it will last!" He wrapped both cuffed hands around one of Erik's wrists, a strong warm solid wrist. Flesh and bone.

"Charles…" Erik raised his other hand to touch Charles's face, a shy brush of fingertips much more restrained than the devouring hunger in his eyes. There was something else there, too—deep sorrow and pain.

"Erik, what's happening?" Charles whispered.

Erik glanced at the floor indicator above the elevator door. Charles realized it had already chimed too many times to be taking them to the lobby. "There's no time to explain. Do you trust me?"

"Yes," Charles said without hesitation.

Erik made a sound almost like a sob, and wrapped his arms around Charles, who leaned hungrily into the embrace, wishing he could do more to return it. He could feel Erik's hand cradling the back of his head, Erik's heart pounding against his skin.

"God," Erik said, voice choked, "this feels better than I ever dreamed."

The elevator doors opened onto a hallway of tile and cold light, with a sign reading MORGUE LEVEL—and a man, dapper and smiling, hands in his pockets. Sebastian Shaw.

Charles had only a moment to struggle before heat and light burst from the hand Erik had pressed to his head, and everything went black.


	7. Chapter 7

Charles woke to the sound of voices, murky and incoherent in his swimmy head. He was on a cold floor, lying on his side—his hands still cuffed, he realized as he tried to move, but now behind his back.

The voices suddenly came clear, and he went still.

"—autopsy, but it won't matter," one said, a horribly, chillingly familiar voice, one he had taken great comfort in the thought of never hearing again. "All the pieces were put back inside; their exact order and condition can be restored easily enough."

"What a relief." Erik's voice, dry and sarcastic. Erik, who had brought him here to Shaw, and knocked him out when he tried to fight. Something inside Charles ached sharply, and he told himself it was aftereffects of the spell.

He opened his eyes and waited for his vision to settle. They were in some sort of examination room with a drain in the floor. On a nearby table was a coffin—the coffin Charles had picked out, seven years ago, to bury his uncle in. Erik and Shaw were lifting off the lid, and nothing about this made sense, because there was Shaw inside the coffin, just as he ought to be. How were there two of him?

Charles reached for his magic, his mind already spinning through different plans—should he attack, escape, take Erik with him?—only to have his half-formed concentration shatter with a gasp. Something around his wrists had tightened the moment he touched his magic, driving a hundred tiny spikes of pain into his skin.

Thorn manacles. They'd put him in thorn manacles. He wouldn't be able to use magic at all while those were on him.

"Ah, we're awake," Shaw—the living one—said, turning his head toward Charles as he and Erik set the coffin lid aside. "Perfect timing. Not that we couldn't have done it with you sleeping, but this is much more fun."

Charles tried to catch Erik's eye, but Erik was looking anywhere but at him.

"What's happening?" Charles said. "Who are you? You can't—you can't be Sebastian—"

Shaw waved a dismissive hand. "Oh, no, I am simply one of the tricks Sebastian didn't get around to teaching you. A sort of magical clone." His smile widened. "Too bad you did in your master before he could finish your lessons. I wouldn't have guessed you had that much spirit in you. That's good—my master will need all the spirit you can provide."

Charles felt a horrible sinking in his stomach. "You're trying to bring him back."

"With your help, dear boy," Clone-Shaw said, and picked up a scalpel from a nearby tray.

Terror cleared the last of the fuzziness from his head, and Charles tried to get up, scrabbling away across the tile floor with his hands straining against the manacles. Erik was at his side in an eyeblink, helping to pull him upright—then holding him still as Clone-Shaw approached.

"Don't fight him, Charles, he just needs a little blood," Erik said, arms like iron around Charles's chest.

"For this step, anyway," Clone-Shaw said, and sliced a neat line down Charles's immobilized arm.

Struggling did no good; Clone-Shaw caught his flowing blood in a tiny silver tray, murmuring things under his breath that Charles didn't understand but that still made his skin crawl. Charles watched in unwilling fascination as power swirled into the blood, invisible to the eye but not to a wizard's other senses.

"Why my blood?" Charles said. "Why not Erik's—since he seems to have some these days—or anyone off the street? I'm no blood relation of Shaw's…"

"No," Clone-Shaw said absently, "but you were his apprentice and raised in his household. There's enough connection between your souls and your magics for this, if barely." He blew steam off the little tray of blood and carried it over to the coffin.

"We have to stop this," Charles whispered to Erik as soon as Clone-Shaw's back was turned. "I can see what he's offered for your cooperation, but Erik, this can't be what you want. Sebastian Shaw back to life? The man who murdered you and all your family?"

"I don't have any choice," Erik replied, a low rumble of sound, warm breath against Charles's ear. Heaven help him, Charles couldn't suppress his awareness of that, and of Erik's arms around him and Erik's chest tight against his back.

"There are always choices."

"Yes," Erik breathed. "And this is mine. I hope you'll understand, later."

Clone-Shaw had bent over the body in the coffin—tipping the blood into the corpse's mouth. Charles tried not to gag.

The corpse’s throat moved. And then its eyes opened.

He was still undeniably dead, his skin waxy and withered, a faint fuzz of mold across his face. But he was awake all the same, pulling himself upright with the stiffness of an old man after a long nap. His eyes were clear and alert, and when his curious survey of the room caught on Charles and Erik, his smile was exactly like Charles's memories. And nightmares.

"Erik took the deal we offered," Clone-Shaw said, helping his master climb out of the coffin. Shaw stretched, joints cracking horribly, and brushed dust off his burial suit. "Young Xavier, on the other hand, is here against his will."

"No surprise there," Shaw muttered. "Well done." He clapped the clone on the shoulder and jerked his head at the coffin.

Without another word, Clone-Shaw took his master's place in the coffin and folded his hands across his stomach. In the time it took for him to exhale one last time, his skin took on the same gray lifelessness—even the same shadowy layer of mold—as the real Shaw's, and then his stillness was absolute. Purpose fulfilled. Even his suit, Charles realized, was visually identical to Shaw's. There would be no reason to question that this was the same body that had lain in Shaw's grave the last seven years.

How often had Shaw gone through this process?

Shaw closed the coffin lid over his lifeless duplicate and turned around.

"Now comes the part we need my treacherous former apprentice for," he said, eyeing Charles with unsettling intensity as he walked closer. Charles fought to withdraw from his approach, unable to bear the thought of Shaw's dead hands on his skin, but Erik held him fast. Fortunately, Shaw made no move to touch him, only looked him over carefully. "Yes, he'll definitely do. Put him up there," he gestured at the coffin. "It'll make an adequate altar."

An adequate _what?_

Charles struggled as hard as he could, but he was still disoriented and weak from whatever spell Erik had used to knock him out. He tried again to draw on his magic, but the pain of the thorn manacles was enough to buckle his knees. When he tried to shout for help—this was the morgue, not the cemetery, people worked here, there had to be people around—Shaw pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and stuffed it into Charles's mouth. Then he took hold of Charles's legs and helped heave him up onto the coffin.

"I'll expect this back," Shaw said, handing Erik a black wand—ah yes, Shaw had been buried with his wand. That had been requested in his will, and Charles had thought it a fine way to dispose of the evil thing without risking magical backlash from destroying it. What he would give to change that decision now! "I assume my duplicate told you how to do this?"

"He was very clear," Erik said reassuringly.

Shaw walked around the table so that he could stand over Charles while facing Erik, and placed one withered hand on Charles's forehead, the other on his belly.

Now Charles recognized the ritual that was about to take place. Erik was about to feed Charles's life force, all of it, into Shaw, in order to restore true life and vitality to what was currently just a reanimated corpse.

Charles tore his face away from Shaw's hand and worked the handkerchief out of his mouth.

"Erik! Erik, please! Why are you doing this?"

Erik wouldn't look at him, his expression stony, but Charles knew Erik's face too well. He could see the agony in it.

"Isn't it obvious why he's doing this?" Shaw chuckled. "I'm giving him what he's wanted for centuries. What do _you_ have to offer? Or did you think he was your friend? Erik doesn't get attached to people anymore. You're like a butterfly to him—pleasant enough to have around, but he won't hesitate to smash you if it becomes necessary. And it has."

"I know that's not true." Charles continued looking steadily at Erik. "Erik, please don't do this."

Erik raised the wand and began to chant.

The words were ugly and wrong, falling strangely against the ear as if the very air they crossed were recoiling from them. Charles kicked, trying to thrash his way off the altar-coffin—only for the spell to lay over him like a net, freezing him in place.

"Be still, Charles," Erik said, a few words of English dropped around the spell almost too quickly to notice. As if he were a child, to be soothed and held still and done to according to others' wishes. Charles tried to scream, but the net wouldn't let him. He could hardly draw breath.

Above him, Shaw's face was all toothy anticipation, head tilted back as if to enjoy all those ugly words washing over him…

And then he frowned.

Erik's chanting had changed, his voice harsher and more urgent, and though the words were still ugly they were different words than they had been before.

"What are you doing, Erik?" Shaw snapped.

Erik did not respond, did not falter. His face did not look agonized anymore. It looked fierce and terrible as an avenging angel's, and the wand, Charles realized with a start, was no longer pointing at him, but at Shaw.

"Stop!" Shaw cried, and started to move away from the altar, perhaps to rush at Erik—

He moved too late. Erik gave a final shout, and a red-tinged darkness burst from the wand, hitting Shaw squarely in the chest.

Shaw staggered back against the wall, and looked down at his body—which was fragmenting, darkness spreading from his chest like veins or cracks, distant fire somewhere at its center. He looked up at Erik. "You! You would betray me?"

Erik laughed in something like disbelief. "Yes, Shaw, I would betray you gladly, eagerly, and for no reward at all. Even if you hadn't enslaved me and murdered my family, choosing between you and _him,"_ he pointed at Charles, "was the easiest choice of my life."

Shaw, his body crumbling rapidly away, tried to speak, but all that came out was a guttural cry. He moved one disintegrating hand, flinging a ball of white-hot energy—not at Erik, but at Charles.

Charles, still held in place by the spell, had only a moment to gasp and close his eyes—

Erik hit him like a battering ram, both of them crashing against the wall and to the floor, Erik's body shielding his from impact and magic alike.

Then there was a flash of red light, and over Erik's shoulder Charles could see Shaw shatter into oblivion, nothing left of him but dark smudges on the walls.


	8. Chapter 8

"Erik!" Charles fought his way out from under Erik's weight, kicking at the table they'd fallen from to make room. At least Shaw's death had freed him of the thorn manacles; they fell painlessly away from his wrists as he moved.

"Charles…"

 _Alive,_ Charles thought with a rush of relief, but it didn't last. Not when turning Erik over revealed a huge charred hole in the side of his torso. "Erik…"

Erik pulled Charles's hand away from the wound, pressing it to his cheek instead. "I'm sorry, Charles, I'm sorry—it had to be this way—I had no chance to explain—"

"What are you talking about?"

"I had to let him come back. In order to kill him for good. There's no telling—what contingencies he had if the clone failed—had to let him think he succeeded—" Erik was gasping painfully for breath, still pressing Charles's hand to his cheek. "I would never. Have let him hurt you."

Charles became dimly aware that he was crying. "I know you wouldn't. Now be still, there's got to be something I can do about this, when I've got enough magic to choke a rhino—"

"No. If Shaw knows one thing, it's how to kill. Knew one thing." Erik laughed breathlessly. "Finally outlived the bastard."

"I'd rather it was by more than two minutes, thanks. Pull yourself together, Erik, we've got to…" But moving Erik's clothes out of the way showed a wound that was still _growing,_ magic sizzling around the edges, eating away at Erik's body. Charles had no idea what could even cause that, much less how to counter it. He put a hand to his mouth in dismay.

"I told you," Erik said, because Erik Lehnsherr could feel smug about being right on his deathbed. Then the smirk faded, replaced by a softer smile. He reached up to brush a tear off of Charles's cheek. "It's all right, Charles. This is what I wanted, remember? The death denied me."

Charles could only give an inarticulate sob, his mind spinning through options. He'd done enough study of the threads of power tying Erik to his skull, perhaps he could reproduce them, perhaps he could… replicate one of Shaw's cruelest, blackest spells in order to keep Erik at his side…

"I have no regrets," Erik said, "save this one." He pulled Charles down and kissed him.

It was a kiss that wanted to be a hundred kisses—first blushing attempt, sweet exploration, gentle comfort, celebration and joy, desperate devouring need, all the moments they had wanted and thought they could never have, all crushed into one. Charles closed his eyes and gave himself completely to the kiss. To Erik. To the one moment they could have.

Until the moment ended, Erik's hand falling away from Charles's face to land heavily on the floor.


	9. Chapter 9

_Peeking Through the Gateway: Beyond_   _Séance and Ouija_  sat open before him, but Charles hadn’t turned a page in—how many minutes? Beside the book, a cup of tea had long since gone cold, while Charles stared down at his own arm. A bruise bloomed dark there, in the unmistakable shape of a man’s hand. Erik’s hand, holding him as he tried to get away from Shaw. It would fade, in a few days, and there would be no proof that Erik ever touched him at all.

The bell over the door jingled, startling Charles half out of his skin, and Detective MacTaggert walked in.

“So you are here! Levine was sure you’d made a run for the border. Nice to see you got away from the FBI.”

“Got… away?” Charles stammered, mind racing—but Moira wasn’t reaching for her gun or handcuffs, her body language casual and calm.

“I mean they released you,” she said. “I assume. Or else you really should be making for the border.” She raised an eyebrow.

“Ah. Yes.” Charles managed a sheepish smile. “That was all a big misunderstanding.”

“As was our arrest of you, apparently.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, it’s the funniest thing. Not only did all that pressure from above to collar you vanish, it actually reversed and became insistent on your full release, all charges dropped.”

Charles tried his best to look surprised. Relieved, at least, was sincere enough. “Funny world, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, you said that to me once before,” Moira said, a little too evenly.

Charles grinned before he could stop himself. A little magical intimidation had gone a long way with the handful of Shaw’s old friends who had been pulling strings to help the clone get Shaw exhumed and Charles arrested. Charles couldn’t have actually hurt them—much—without bringing the Council down on himself, but they didn’t have to know that.

And it was nice for his magic to be of  _some_  help during this whole bloody ordeal.

“It was as true then as it is now,” Charles said cheerfully.

“Uh-huh,” Moira said, looking slightly unsettled. “Anyway… this turned up in an old file about you. I thought you might like to have it.” She held out a tiny square to him—a photograph, Charles realized, as he reached out to take it.

A photograph of himself as a little child, being held by his smiling father. Both of them happy and healthy and beautiful. Charles felt his breath catch.

“I know you don’t have much from your past,” Moira said. “Mementos can’t replace people, but it’s nice to have some concrete reminder. Something you can touch.”

“Yes.” He blinked rapidly, trying not to sniffle. “I don’t have any pictures of my father. Or I didn’t.” He reached out, mixed sleight-of-hand with a touch of actual power, and pulled a showy scarlet flower out from behind Moira’s ear. “My thanks, Detective,” he said, presenting it to her with a flourish.

She shook her head, her unsettled look melting under fond indulgence. “You’re welcome, Charles. We may have a case for you in a day or two, depending on how some things shake out. We, uh… may have found a body drained of blood.”

“Oh, excellent! My bills and I are at your disposal.”

 

Charles saw Moira to the door. As it closed behind her, a voice spoke at his shoulder, so close he could have felt the speaker’s breath. If he’d had any.

“Something you can touch, eh?”

“Yes, it is wonderful to have that,” Charles said, still watching out the glass. “Even briefly.”

He turned, then, to face Erik, standing so close, with one of his shoulders still half-buried in the wall.

Neither of them had known whether to laugh or cry, yesterday in the morgue, when Erik’s body dissolved in a flash of light and left only the rune-carved skull—and the ghost standing beside it. Charles had wanted to touch Erik more than ever then, to give him some comfort in finding himself trapped again after all. How silly of them both, to ever think Shaw would have really set him free.

Now Erik raised a hand and skimmed fingertips over Charles’s face, fingertips that passed through without the slightest hint of a sensation. Charles had wondered once if he was imagining Erik’s haunted, hungry expression—now he knew he wasn’t. “‘Briefly’ might be worse for us both, in the long run,” Erik said. “To have and then lose is… harder than I expected.”

“If Shaw could do it, I can do it,” Charles said urgently. “I’ll figure it out, Erik. Don’t give up hope.”

“Hope,” Erik said, “is a luxury I cannot afford, at my age.”

Charles chased Erik’s hand with his own as it tried to withdraw; after a moment, Erik cooperated, and they stood with their hands mirrored, fingers spread, as if trying to touch through a glass. Unable to feel each other, but still inhabiting the same space. Still together. “Then I will hope for us both.”


End file.
